BuzzerBeater Forums

My suggestion is that two teams in each division should be promoted instead of current one team. Sure, it might feel strange to promote both conference winners but I think that the added value surely is worth it.

This would in my opinion be very valuable for countries which cannot fill third division today such as Sweden. That two teams promote would lead to a structure of 1 division I, 2 division II, 4 division III, 8 division IV, 16 division V and 32 division VI. Even for countries with up to 976 teams would it be a rather short way to top division as teams would start in sixth division and after promotions be in highest division. In a country with that many teams a team will never be able to compete with the best teams in less than 10 seasons anyway so it would not slow down the progress.

The major added value is that there would be many fewer divisions which would have a lot of empty slots. Currently in Sweden we can only fill 2 division III leagues and I am sure that the situation is similar in other countries.

For at least a country like Sweden with only 123 active teams am I sure that it would be welcomed by most. Maybe would some users be disappointed the first few seasons if they would be relegated to division III as a consequence but I think that most would rather be challenging for promotion in a lower division than having very marginal chance of anything better than mid-table. They might as well like the tougher challenge of avoiding relegation.

In countries with more users than Sweden it might be less attractive.

That it is possible to adjust league structures similarly has been proven in Utopia where it is not the same number of promoted teams and fifth and sixth placed teams are playing relegation games. The bottom division in Utopia have the number of leagues adjusted so it should be possible to do so in each country. In extreme cases could such a change be decided in each country through a votation.

Hope that more than me wants to push for such change. I think that it would both increase the number of users, as more will stay when they are more likely to play equally strong teams when they start the game, and more will stay because they will have fewer weak teams to play and it might remain a challenge in a lower division with a tougher competition which unavoidably should be the case when fewer teams plays at each level.

The one concern I would have is that if two teams from each series promote to the next level, 8 teams will have to demote from the leagues above to balance that out. Part of the fun of the game for me is developing long-term rivalries inside leagues and with 10 of 16 teams being replaced each season (two promotions, 8 demotions), it'd be much harder to see those rivalries form.

One alternative might be to extend the offseason by a week (starting the tournament a week earlier so that the All-Star game might also no longer be needed), and have the top team in each league that didn't promote (either by regular season record or the team that lost in the finals) play a 3-game series against a relegation series winner in the higher division, with the winner being in the higher league and the loser in the lower league. It would allow some more movement, and make the consequences of falling to sixth still matter if (as in our series) the bottom three teams on one side are either tanking or a bot/replaced by a new team.

The whole idea with my suggestion is to not change how many teams that relegate. It would still be four teams relegating from higher division. The difference would be a factor of 2 leagues per division instead of 4 as it is now. Now it is 1 division I, 4 division II, 16 division III and 64 division IV. My suggestion would change it to 1 division I, 2 division II, 4 division III, 8 division IV, 16 division V and 32 division VI. It would be some divisions more in each country but instead these divisions would have more equal teams than are the case today. In Sweden already the second division has a very huge difference in quality between top, middle and bottom, which is not strange as there are barely any teams left in division III nowadays.

How to solve such short term problems are certainly something that is solvable. One alternative is to have same income in the two level lower division after it is implemented. To improve the fun in the games for users surely must be worth such short-term problem. You have a similar situation when teams gets relegated today.

Short term a new league system might lose a few users but on long-term I think that it is of high value to keep BB alive.